zürich - new york city by plane | new york city in 3 days (may 14-17, 2004)

i flew from zürich airport (ZRH) to john f. kennedy airport new york (JFK) on friday, may 14, 2004 on board of a Swiss Airbus A-330. even if we left zürich half an hour late, we arrived in new york ten minutes early. the flight was easy and convenient. i had a chance to glimpse down while we flew over st. johns, later the sky was cloudy.

on saturday, i walked down the broadway from 53rd street where i stayed at the sheraton hotel and towers all the way down to the battery park. on sunday, we visited the central park and the campus of the columbia university.

the sheraton hotel and towers congress center was a suitable host for this conference, but quite expensive. the rooms were ok, the high speed Internet connection worked very well but at the cost of another $14.95 per day. the WLAN worked most of the time with good performance. there were not as many power plugs as in budapest, attendees often sat on the floor just to be close to a power
outlet.

unfortunately, they did not provide a list of attendees. at the registration desk, they couldn't even tell how may attendees they had this year. my guess is that there were about 1000. i know of 5 people from switzerland.

the so called "conference banquet" was quite a disappointment - there is much more to new york city than the tiny balcony of grand station ...

it was all about semantic web ! there was probably not a single session where the terms "semantic web" and "onthology" haven't been mentioned at least a dozen times - not to mention the abbreviation "RDF". so why is the web still chaotic, unstructured, un-annotated and not semantic ? in my opinion mainly because RDF etc. is just too complicated to use and it does not pay off. if portals and search engines would make use of semantic data, so that
(commercial) websites could actually take advantage of the added metadata, the semantic web would probably become reality over night. on the other hand, adobe made its products RDF enabled, so there are at least some commercial products on the market now, that can add and take advantage of metadata, that's at least a beginning ...one of the panelists mentioned during the session "will the semantic web scale ?" that librarians were classifying and categorizing information since decades. so if
we take the semantic web serious, i believe that people from the IT department, public relations and libraries should come together and start taking care of the web. there is more to the web presence of a company or university than just technology, or plain marketing or collecting documents - it is all of that ! the web is where it comes together: the (IT) technicians providing a solid and reliable server platform and tools to maintain documents, the marketers providing the information that we want to
provide inside our organization and to the public and the librarians who organize, describe and classify the information so that it is useful for humans and machines alike. unfortunately, there are two words that tend to hinder this collaboration: "power" and "control" ...

web services are kind of "the other half of the web" - if it is not "semantic web", then it is "web services". as with the semantic web, everybody talks about it but they are hardly used yet. however, there are tools around to write and use web services and they are a great extension to the web. i'm very positive that we will see a lot of useful web services soon.

device independence and accessibility are still hot topics. in the meantime, more than 15 countries have accessibility guidelines, policies or even legislations, including switzerland, see www.admin.ch/ch/d/sr/151_3/index.html (in German) and especially article 14 (also in German). the W3C tries - unfortunately rather unsuccessfully - to harmonize these regulations. nevertheless the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is an important initiative and deserves all support that we can provide. to some extend, accessibility and device independence go hand in hand. there are interesting activities going on to
provide access to content device independent. both, accessibility and small devices depend on the separation of content and presentation in order to present information to the user in the most appropriate way.access to content with small devices such as PDAs and smart phones will become much more important with the growing availability of wireless Internet access. when wireless access is available all over major cities, people will use their PDAs and smart phones to get information about time tables,
schedules, events - both business and leisure - anytime, anywhere. providing device independent access to information may become a business critical issue.

new top level domains are nothing but a pain in the ass. tim berner's lee said it much more politely, but he is obviously very concerned about the new top level domains that have been proposed by ICANN. "they will fragment the web", tbl said at the opening ceremony of this conference. there are other ways to
distinguish content, rather than top level domains.from my point of view, there is only one way how individuals and companies alike should react to these proposed top level domains: ignore them, do not use them ! nobody but the registrars will take advantage of these new top level domains ...

w3photo.org is an interesting project they started at this conference. the goal is to collect pictures from all past and future conferences and to put them up in galleries. of course, this shall become a semantic collection. they provide a tool to annotate the pictures using RDF photo, so people can add a story to the picture - or to parts of it - and preserve and share the memories connected with these
photos.

there seems to be some common agreement that web services need more semantics. significant disagreement lies in what "more semantics" means. the panel discussed if web semantics and web services eventually may get married or not.

during the closing ceremony, robert cailliau was acknowledge for his tremendous efforts and achievements for the world wide web community and the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2). tim berners lee honored robert cailliau with a brief "laudation". unfortunately, robert was not able to participate in this conference.